Paralympian and all-around bad ass athlete Tyler Walker (and teammate Laurie Stephens) climbed the Mt. Washington Auto Road in wheelchairs yesterday as part of the Adaptive Sports Partners of the North Country's annual Sunrise Ascent fundraiser. In honor of the event, here's a story of the first wheelchair ascent, from the August 13, 2005 Caledonian-Record.
BY MEGHAN McCARTHY
Staff Writer
Cam Shaw-Doran climbs hills mainly
for the pure thrill of a speedy descent.
When he pushed to the top of the
northeast’s highest peak last week, however, it was not for the glory of the
downhill ride, but to become the first person in a wheelchair ever to summit
6,288-foot Mount Washington.
“We didn’t train at all. We just
went over and did it,” Shaw-Doran said of the hike suggested by his friend
Geoff Krill, who is also in a wheelchair.
The two set off up the Mount Washington Auto Road
early Aug. 1 with a few friends and a video camera to document the trek. While
Krill, exhausted, gave up the effort around the six mile mark – the road is 7.6
miles long – Shaw-Doran pushed on, reaching the summit at dusk.
Natives of the North
Country, Krill and Shaw-Doran were both avid athletes and
adventure-seekers prior to being paralyzed by separate accidents in the 1990s.
Their Mount Washington hike is just one in a
string of activities both men continue to pursue.
“Geoff totally lied to me,”
Shaw-Doran, 26, said of the Washington
climb. “He said, ‘Oh, yeah, the first mile’s the worst part.’ It just kind of
got steeper and steeper.”
The feat took about 14 and a half
hours and included pushing through some serious pain, as well as a hearty dose
of the mountain’s infamous weather – chilling fog, squalling winds, and a succession
of rain storms.
“I never felt like I wanted to
stop, but I felt like I might not make it,” Shaw-Doran said this week, recalling
severe muscle cramps and debilitating pain in his elbow. “Everything hurt.”
The climb was especially rough on
his hands, which eventually became numb. To keep them from slipping off his
rain-slicked, mountain bike-style tires, Shaw-Doran wedged his hands between
spokes to turn the wheels of his chair.
The toughest stretch was a two-mile
section of gravel. While Shaw-Doran pushed with all of his might on his chair’s
large back wheels, the smaller front wheels would sink and spin. For much of
the climb, his torso was pressed flat against his legs as he struggled to
continue moving upwards without slipping back, especially near the end of the
climb, where the grade is 22 percent – about a 45 degree angle.
“It’s brutal on your body,” Krill
said. “It’s a great experience, but it’s not something that you’d want to do
all the time.”
Krill, who has climbed other
mountains on hiking trails in what he described as a team effort, said Washington was not on
his peak-bagging to-do list, mainly because much of the route is paved. The motivation
for the climb came at the end of June with a newspaper report that a man from Pennsylvania had tried
unsuccessfully to reach the top of the mountain in a wheelchair.
When he realized no one in a
wheelchair had ever summited Washington,
Krill asked Shaw-Doran if he was up to the challenge.
“It’s our home state, and that’s
the kind of thing we do around here,” Krill said. “It just made sense.”
While Krill did not reach the
summit last week – he was bogged down by a 45-pound chair he said sapped his
strength – he encouraged Shaw-Doran to keep pushing to get there.
“One of us had to make it up
there,” Krill said. “You don’t go through this much effort and not make it.”
Against the grain
Shaw-Doran lives in Easton with world ski
champion and lifelong friend Bode Miller in a house tucked behind the Tamarack
Tennis Camp run by Miller’s family. The house has been dubbed “Cam-Bode-a”
(pronounced: Cambodia)
by some friends.
Before the car accident seven years
ago that left Shaw-Doran’s legs paralyzed, he was an avid snowboarder. While
the accident robbed Shaw-Doran of the use of his lower limbs, however, it has
done little to diminish his playfully rebellious side.
In the first big air snowboarding
contest Shaw-Doran entered as a kid, he was disqualified for doing a backwards
inversion. Despite the disqualification, his jump – which he said he landed
cleanly – was a big hit with spectators.
Shaw-Doran said it took him a year
after the accident – six months of which were spent in the hospital – to be
able to get around on his own. Gradually, he started hand-cycling, then skiing
with a mono-ski – a bucket chair that rides on a single ski.
Now, he said, he can rip turns on
any mountain in the winter and puts in 1,000 miles or more on his bike every
summer. He’s a common sight along Easton
Valley Road, arms pumping, chest heaving, as he
works to spin the wheels and propel his bike along the pavement.
He’s also a student at Plymouth State University,
where he’s working toward a degree in business.
Krill, who taught him how to ski
with the mono-ski, said it took a little while to convince Shaw-Doran to get active
again. Now the two spend a lot of time skiing and biking together.
“Life’s pretty cool in a
wheelchair, and he’s figured that out,” said Krill, who was paralyzed in a
snowmobile accident 10 years ago.
Krill is now the winter sports coordinator
at the Loon Mountain
adaptive ski program, where he teaches others who are wheelchair-bound that
there’s plenty of fun to be had in the arena of the White
Mountains.
Krill is also the first person to
mono-ski Mount Washington’s legendary
Tuckerman Ravine, a feat he accomplished this March.
Shaw-Doran has also figured out how
to get going really fast on his bike. That love of speed – and his tendency to
go confidently a little bit against the grain – is something he shares with
Miller, who may be the fastest guy on the mountain on any given day, but is
unlikely to show too much semblance of traditional form.
Shaw-Doran said the fastest he’s ever
gone on his bike – about 60 miles-per-hour – was coming down Three Mile Hill in
Franconia.
“I was kind of cheating,” he
admitted. “Because I was drafting Bode in his Porsche.”
Inspiring others
Krill and Shaw-Doran both said they
don’t have much desire to climb Mount Washington
again. Krill would rather hike in his modified mountain chair, which has two
long poles at the front – instead of the standard small front wheels – in what
he described as a rickshaw style that allows other hikers to help pull him
through river crossings and over boulders.
“There’s a lot of other things I
would do before [hiking Washington],”
Krill said. “I would rather go to places that are a little bit more pristine –
I guess paths less traveled.”
Shaw-Doran would rather be out on
the road with his hand-cycle or on a snowy mountain with his ski.
“I think I’ll bike across the United States,”
Shaw-Doran said when asked what his next adventure would be. “That’s just an
idea. I’ve always wanted to do it.”
Krill is game, and the two may
embark on that long journey next summer, he said, if they can find the time and
the sponsorship money to do it.
If they go, Krill said, he’d like
the expedition to include visiting rehabilitation hospitals along the way. He
hopes to carry a variety of sports gear to demonstrate to others in wheelchairs
the vast possibilities for athletic and recreational activities.
“They just don’t realize what’s out
there,” he said. “They need to see people doing it, who are active in it, to
understand.”
While Krill said he and Shaw-Doran
didn’t want any media attention prior to the Washington hike, because it would have taken
away from their enjoyment of it, he said rousing others into action was one of
his prime motivating factors.
“It’s great for the attention afterwards,
because maybe it’ll inspire someone else in a chair,” Krill said.
Inspiration seems to be all in a
day’s work – or a day’s play – for Krill.
“I would have never, ever gone or
tried or made it without Geoff. I wish he could have been there with me,”
Shaw-Doran said of his successful summit of the mountain. Then, with a grin,
Shaw-Doran remembered that Krill has already achieved his own first on Washington: the mono-ski
run down Tuck’s.
“He owns the other side of the
mountain,” Shaw-Doran said.
